He died "of exhaustion" at the Vorkutlag labour camp 2,500 km / 1,600 miles north-east of Moscow,[1] slightly less than three years after his brother's suicide near New York City.
Hermann Duncker (1874–1960), his father, was a trades union activist who later became a founder member of the Communist Party and later still became a professor and dean of faculty at the University of Rostock.
His mother fled to Denmark after the assassinations of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,[6] but after the most intense phase of the socio-political revolution and economic collapse that followed the war, Wolfgang attended school at Gotha between 1920 and 1923.
[2] A few months after joining the Communist Party he was employed by the left-leaning "Berlin am Morgen" (Munzenberg-owned newspaper) to edit the "Entertainment supplement" ("Unterhaltungsbeilage").
Along with the editorial duties, between the end of 1929 and the start of 1933 he contributed several hundred articles of his own on films, stage plays and literature under the pseudonym "Mersus".
[3][7] Early in 1931 Duncker went alone for a stay in Davos, hoping that the famously health-giving high valley air would improve the problems he was having with his lungs.
A sympathetic hotel worker discreetly arranged for him to be smuggled into a more expensive room during the daytime, while the guest who was using it was safely out of the way on the ski slopes.
Nemesis arrived in the form of the room's occupant when she unexpectedly returned early from the slopes and found a strange man sunbathing on her balcony.
The "Berlin am Morgen" (newspaper) was banned, which meant that Wolfgang Duncker found himself without a job and at the back of the queue for any other employment opportunities.
[1] There are references to Wolfgang Duncker having attempted to launch himself in a new career as a filmscript writer in Switzerland and/or France in 1933 or 1934, but these came to nothing and in October 1934 the couple returned home to Berlin in Nazi Germany.
During 1935 Wolfgang's father, who had tried to maintain a low profile while living under intense police surveillance since his release from prison in November 1933, planned his escape to Denmark.
[8] His older brother Karl found his academic career in Berlin blocked and escaped to Cambridge, England where Frederic Bartlett welcomed him with a job.
[9]) Despite troubling rumours that were beginning to circulate to the contrary, many committed communists like Wolfgang and Erika Duncker still tended to see the Soviet Union as a promised land that showed the route to a better future for mankind.
[1] Meanwhile, at the top of the Soviet party there was a growing fear, bordering on paranoia, that there might be people in positions of influence who believed that someone else – possibly Leon Trotsky, at this stage living in exile in Norway (later Mexico) – might be a better national leader than Comrade Stalin.
Wolfgang was one of many political exiles from Nazi Germany who had taken refuge in Moscow to be "caught up" in what English language sources identify as the Great Purge ("Большой террор").
His father, having endured an extended period in an internment camp in Morocco, was able to join his wife in America in September 1941, but was still very ill. Käte Duncker had been living in New York since the end of 1936.
Umansky wrote that her daughter-in-law, Erika Duncker, might visit her husband in the labour camp, and should report back on how his health had been shattered.
Whatever the ambassador's private thoughts, arranging Wolfgang Duncker's rescue from the arctic labour camp was clearly far beyond his powers.
She was shocked that her young husband was now ill, aged and emaciated with his front teeth broken, his legs swollen and his complexion pasty and yellowed.